Gideon the Cutpurse (6 page)

SIX
Lost in Time
In which Peter and Kate discover that their troubles have only just begun

Gideon handed each of the children a crispy-skinned trout that he had skewered on a long stick. He motioned for them to sit. "You need to eat," he said. "We can talk afterward." All three sat in a circle around the crackling fire, glad to be putting food in their bellies. Peter and Kate shot sidelong looks at Gideon every now and then. There was a quiet dignity about him that made them feel shy. Gideon ate his trout peaceably, and when he intercepted one of Peter's curious glances, he smiled at him, an open, warmhearted smile.
Gideon stripped off the last morsels of pink flesh with his teeth, then flung the bones into the fire and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He wore a loose white shirt, soiled and torn after several days on the road, and well-worn boots, caked in mud almost to the knees, into which were tucked tight-fitting trousers. A small hawthorn twig had caught in his blond ponytail. On the ground next to him lay a three-cornered hat, less grimy, but of a similar shape to that worn by the Tar Man. Peter wondered why both people he had encountered since his arrival here looked and sounded like people in costume dramas on the television. An explanation for this popped into his mind, which he immediately dismissed as being too ridiculous to contemplate.
"Thank you for my breakfast, young master. I watched how you caught the fish. It is a rare skill that you have."
Peter looked at him in surprise. "You saw me?"
"When I saw the manner of your arrival I had to be sure I had nothing to fear from you. And I believe we share an enemy."
"Oh, please," burst in Kate suddenly. "I must phone home. My name is Kate Dyer and my parents will be going mad with worry. Do you have a mobile phone?"
Gideon looked at her, puzzled.
"Or do you know where there's a phone box?"
"I do not understand you, Mistress Kate."
Kate wrung her hands in exasperation.
"How
did
we arrive?" asked Peter. "What enemy?"
Gideon searched their eager, anxious faces. What should he do with these children? This was a strange predicament indeed. He looked at the sun climbing ever higher in the sky and stood up purposefully.
"Will you walk with me? I wish to reach my destination before nightfall." He swung a large bag over one shoulder and tapped his hat on his head. He looked over at Peter. "And may I ask
your
name, young sir?"
"My name is Peter, Peter Schock."
"Tell me," Gideon continued, "is it possible that our paths have crossed before this day? When I first saw your face I felt that someone had stepped over my grave...." A look of concern swept across his face. "You are not, of course...
spirits
?" He made light of the question by laughing.
Kate and Peter remained silent, unsure whether this was a joke. Peter shook his head uncertainly. Gideon clearly felt awkward, for he set off up the slope at what seemed to the children a furious pace. At first they were forced to jog to keep up with him, but when Gideon noticed how little used they were to walking any distance, he slowed down. Eventually, as though he had been debating what to do, or what to say, or, indeed, what to believe, Gideon answered Peter's question.
"The enemy I spoke of is the Tar Man. He has stolen your property, has he not? And I--let us say, I have unfinished business with him. He has been pursuing me since I left Highgate, these six days past. Were it not for your timely arrival--which put all thought of my capture out of his head--he would have finally caught up with me, of that I am certain.
"I knew he was gaining on me and I had little strength left, so I concealed myself in a hawthorn bush, yonder." Here Gideon paused to point to the northern slopes of the valley where the children had first woken up. "Soon the Tar Man came into view on the brow of the hill, and as he looked out for me and I peeped out at him, we both witnessed you appear out of thin air like some devilish apparition. At first I feared you were both dead, for you were held as if by invisible ropes to that unworldly object, and your heads and limbs lolled down so that you looked like rag dolls. I could not move for I did not want the Tar Man to discover me. He sat on his cart and, by the look on his face, was as terrified as I. A moment later some monstrous force flung your bodies away from the contraption with such power that you landed a dozen paces away. You were lucky to have escaped more grievous injury. I heard the crack as Peter's head struck a rock."
Peter and Kate stopped walking and Peter reached up to touch his tender bruise, which was by now purple and yellow. To be abducted by thieves was one thing, but this seemed infinitely worse. Then, as Kate and Peter looked at each other in horror, their expressions changed subtly and both knew what the other was thinking--that Gideon was either mad or lying or mistaken and that it had all been a trick of the light and that there was a perfectly logical explanation for all this. They did not, of course, say as much to Gideon.
Kate lowered one eyebrow. "And so what happened to the, er, contraption that you were telling us about?" she asked.
"The Tar Man loaded it onto his cart. At one end it was a plain thing, gray and unadorned. At the other there was a silver object that resembled for all the world a giant pear..."
Peter looked at Kate. "The antigravity machine," he mouthed.
Kate nodded.
"Yet there was something magical about it," continued Gideon, "for when he tried to tie it down with rope, it began to dissolve into the air--I could make out the cart through it. It became glassy, like deep, still water. If the Tar Man had not leaped back in terror, I would have doubted the evidence of my own eyes."
"So the magic chest became sort of, blurred round the edges, did it?" asked Peter.
"Blurred, yes, and transparent, like thick glass. And when my gaze fell upon you, Master Peter, you, too, had started to dissolve into the air in the same ungodly fashion as your device."
"Me!" exclaimed Peter. "No! That's not possible!"
"I swear it is true," replied Gideon. "You all but disappeared in the bright sunshine--I do not know what called you back."
"This is unreal," said Peter under his breath. Kate gripped Peter's arm in distress.
"You weren't winding me up, were you? That happened to me, too, didn't it?" she asked in a whisper.
"Look, Gideon," said Peter, taking a step toward him and failing to hide how rattled he was, "we're really grateful to you for helping us out, but could you please take us to the nearest town, we have to get to a phone urgently."
"Phone? What or who is this phone? I do not understand you."
"Oh, come on, you must know," said Peter in frustration, cupping one ear in his hand and pretending to chatter. "Tel-e-phone...Everyone knows what a phone is."
"I have told you that I do not," said Gideon, raising his voice in anger.
"We'll show you when we see one," said Kate hurriedly. "Please forgive us, we're a bit upset. Could you tell us where we are, please? Which part of Australia is this? Or is it New Zealand?"
Gideon seemed baffled for a moment, then spun round to look at her and, seeing that she was deadly serious, burst into laughter.
"Do you think you are in Austria? Ah no, Mistress Kate, this is not Austria."
Kate was about to protest that she meant Australia, when Gideon continued, "We are a stone's throw from Dovedale. As the crow flies, we are less than two hours' walk from Bakewell."
"Dovedale! Bakewell!" exclaimed Kate, her face radiant with relief. "But that's near to where I live.... Oh, Peter, we'll be home by lunchtime!"
"Could you excuse us a moment," said Peter, and he pulled Kate out of Gideon's earshot. He whispered urgently in her ear.
"I know you want to get home, but if this is Derbyshire, how come it's summer? Look, I do like Gideon, but how can we trust what he says when he doesn't even know what a phone is? And I'm not convinced he's heard of Australia, either."
Kate let out a deep sigh and opened her mouth to say something and then changed her mind and shook her head. "Oh, I don't know. I'm so totally confused.... I don't know what to think. Shall we just play along with him until we get to a town?"
Peter nodded. Gideon was pacing about impatiently, waiting for them to set off again. He seemed offended.
"I mean to reach Bakewell by nightfall. If you wish me to take you there, I would ask you to come now. I can escort you to the house of my future employer, where I can ask if you can rest before leaving for London."
"London?" repeated Peter. "Why London?"
"Do you not need the magic chest to return from whence you came? The Tar Man told you--he has taken it to Covent Garden. He lodges, I think, in Drury Lane. He drinks at the Black Lion Tavern, where I have seen him many a time with the Carrick gang. I urge you to find him before he decides to find you. The Tar Man will drive a hard bargain, of that you can be sure. But if he means to hand over the booty to his master...then your troubles have scarcely yet begun. His master is a man in need of constant diversion, and he has a taste for all things mysterious. So if he takes a fancy to it, you may never get it back. It will be lost in a wager or given as payment to his tailor or his wig-maker, or he will demand so high a price you will never be able to pay him. In any case he will deny all knowledge of it. Believe me--for I have cause to know--there is not a more skillful liar in the kingdom."
Gideon waited for a response but got none. Neither Peter nor Kate had any idea how to respond to this mass of baffling information. Gideon's patience was clearly at an end.
"I have delayed long enough. I'm off for Bakewell. Come or stay as you will."
He strode over the ridge of the hill and did not look back. Peter and Kate hurried after their best hope of reaching civilization. Soon Gideon had disappeared into the neighboring valley.
"I don't care about the stupid chest," said Kate in annoyance. "I just want to go home."
Kate turned round to take a last look at the valley. She let out a gasp.
"What's wrong?" Peter asked.
"This
is
my valley," she said in a faltering voice. "I thought I was imagining it last night. This is the way the school bus comes--it's so obvious from this direction. My house should be beside the stream where we spent the night. This is my valley, but there's nothing here. There's nothing here!"
Peter saw Gideon glancing over his shoulder at them and realized that he was not going to wait for them. Kate stood with her hand over her mouth, her gray eyes filling with tears. Peter pulled her by the arm and attempted to reassure her while keeping her moving.
"How can that possibly be?" he said. "I guess one valley must look pretty much like another."
"What do you know?" cried Kate. "You're just a townie! Don't you think I'd recognize my own valley?"
"Okay, okay. Have it your way. There's no need to shout. Just hang on until we reach a phone--one call and all of this will be sorted out."
They walked without speaking, never letting Gideon out of their sight, putting one foot in front of the other through fertile summer meadows, treading over fresh green grass and clover and cow parsley and wishing that someone would pull them out of this bad dream.

* * *

Peter's mother flew back to England from California on Sunday. She arrived in the early hours of Monday morning, only just in time for the press conference that had been hastily organized in the assembly hall of Kate's school in Bakewell. It was a grim homecoming.
The television cameras focused in on Detective Inspector Wheeler, who announced to the press that the children had disappeared without a trace from the research center six miles away at midday forty-eight hours earlier. He said that there were now serious concerns about their safety. Dr. and Mrs. Dyer and Mr. and Mrs. Schock sat in a forlorn row behind a long table. It was more than Mrs. Dyer could bear to be sitting in these circumstances in the same place as she had seen Kate singing her heart out at the Christmas carol concert only one week earlier.
Police telephone numbers and images of the children flashed on the big screen and were beamed to televisions across the country: There was last term's school photograph of Peter with a silly grin on his face, and a video of Kate training Molly to shake hands.
At the end of the press conference Peter's and Kate's parents hurried away from the spotlights to cope with their anguish in private. While the cameramen packed up their equipment, Detective Inspector Wheeler stood staring out of a window, chewing the end of his pencil. He was perplexed. An experienced policeman, he could usually rely on his gut instincts, but with this case he felt he was receiving confused messages. When he had met Peter's parents for the first time, the unmistakable scent of money that wafted around them had made him suspect a kidnapping. Yet no ransom note had been delivered--at least not to his knowledge. Could Mr. and Mrs. Schock be hiding something? And then there was Dr. Williamson's machine, not to mention the representatives whom NASA was sending over from Houston. Why would they do that for some worthless bit of equipment? And, bizarrely, Detective Inspector Wheeler felt in his bones that both children were safe and sound and that, sooner or later, they
would
turn up. He would have liked to share his optimism with the distraught parents, but he could scarcely tell them to stop worrying because he had a funny sort of a hunch that Peter and Kate were all right....
He chewed his pencil and stared absentmindedly at the playing field outside. The watery sunshine had melted most of last night's hard frost, but there were still lingering patches of ice under the branches of the ancient cedar tree that towered over the soccer pitches. Something caught the policeman's eye and he swung his gaze over to one of the far goalposts. The sun, already low in the sky, dazzled him, yet he was sure he could see a figure lying in the mouth of the goal. He squinted in the sunshine. It was a girl, wearing what seemed to be a long green evening dress. She was lying on her back with her knees up, the dress tucked around her legs. Her long red hair streamed out behind her on the muddy pitch.
"Good grief," he exclaimed in his soft Edinburgh accent. "She looks like the Dyer girl!"
He dropped his pencil and immediately ran out of the school and onto the soccer pitch, shouting at two constables to follow him at once. When they reached the goalposts, she had disappeared. Detective Inspector Wheeler turned around slowly, in a full circle, his breath turning to steam in the chill air as he carefully scanned the grounds, but there was no longer any sign of the girl who looked like Kate. He crouched down to search for fresh prints in the half-frozen mud between the goalposts, and he felt all the hackles rise on the back of his neck.